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Author Topic: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition  (Read 4100 times)

Jam The MF

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #15 on: November 18, 2022, 05:50:30 AM »
I see you have included Catfolk.  I bet Catfolk and Bearfolk options, would capture a lot of the player base.
Let the Dice, Decide the Outcome.  Accept the Results.

nielspeterdejong

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #16 on: November 18, 2022, 08:28:19 AM »
I see you have included Catfolk.  I bet Catfolk and Bearfolk options, would capture a lot of the player base.

Well there aren't any official Bearolk in Pathfinder 1E, of which I have made this variant, however I did add on the last page an option to play a more "Strength based beastfolk", by using my revised Orc Atavism. I didn't like how the Pathfinder orc didn't have a standard boost to Strength, while the Orc Atavism option that did have that was pretty underwhelming. As such, half-orcs that want to be thematically strong as well as Bearfolk (and similar beastfolk) can use my homebrew rules to play as one :)

tenbones

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #17 on: November 18, 2022, 11:38:47 AM »
Btw, how popular is Savage Worlds? Do many groups play it? I honestly hadn't heard about it until now.

That's a good question. Relative to DnD? Nothing is popular. Relative to other TTRPG's? Pretty popular from what I can see. It's fully VTT supported, and there has been a massive influx of players converting over from Pathfinder and Palladium Rifts as both of those game systems are licensed and working with Pinnacle to keep their content rolling over seemingly in perpetuity.

Looking at the activity on both their forums and their Discord, Reddit etc. there are tons of people just like you, never heard of it, started playing it, and never went back. I'm one of those people. 40+ years of d20 including writing and development for Paizo and WotC and other third parties, then I played Deadlands back in Explorer Edition (the previous edition to the modern SWADE - Savage Worlds Adventurers Edition - edition) and knew 2-minutes into gameplay that this system could do DnD Fantasy better than DnD and any of its derivatives. I still consider myself a relative newcomer to Savage Worlds. I only wish I got here sooner.

I feel vindicated in that after making those claims the subsequent SWADE edition dropped and then Savage Rifts blew the doors off to show how high this system could scale in regular gameplay. And then when Savage Pathfinder dropped - since all the rules are compatible - it immediately showcased how to run a DnD fantasy game at levels virtually no one plays at except in rarified events. Very very few GM's can or even *want* to maintain a Pathfinder game post 15th lvl. Savage Pathfinder *can* do that level of gameplay without remotely breaking a sweat. And better it can maintain that level of play and *far* beyond that with relative ease.

Savage Worlds being a toolkit put the GM firmly at the wheel for easy rules and mechanics tweaking to fine-tune their game as they see fit. It scales ridiculously easier than d20 does and requires much less effort to run. I'm not saying it's rules-lite. It's low-mid-level crunch once you understand the very basic caveats to its mechanics. But it's far less rigorous than anything d20 and much easier to learn.

Which is exactly what most Pathfinder converts are saying (unsurprisingly) on Reddit and Pinnacle Discord. Frankly none of this surprises me from the Pathfinder crowd. Where I *WAS* shocked was the love Savage Worlds is getting from the Palladium Rifts fandom. Those guys are pretty hardcore, and Savage Rifts has won a lot of them over. So much so going forward all official Palladium products (they have like 8 projects about to be released) will be dual-statted for Savage Worlds.

And in case you don't know - the *reason* I even mention Rifts is because Rifts is *radically* more powerful in context than most things you'd deal with in Pathfinder. The Tarrasque would be a major issue, but would likely be dealt with in relatively short order. It would be one Kaiju+ among **many** other horrible things running around that setting. The chassis upon which Savage Rifts is built can be deconstructed whole or in part to leverage into your high-level Savage Pathfinder games with very little effort. Because the system is designed that way.

So imagine if Pathfinder had rules for 20th-30th level play (and your brain didn't melt from considering those 10-page stat-blocs) but it was actually PLAYABLE not just for kicks and giggles, but for prolonged campaigning. Your characters would START at that power-level and you'd run your campaign normally. Yeah that's how flexible and scalable Savage Worlds is. It's not perfect, but it's damn fine gaming with ridiculous low overhead.

Slipshot762

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #18 on: November 18, 2022, 03:36:14 PM »
Looks better than my typical player handouts but I pee on it for anime, which I hate. So disregarding my bias which my ethos demands I must state, it'd be a great thing to hand to players at the start of a new campaign. Not much of a guru on the 3e rules, never played pathfinder for example, but if you have playtested it and it works, i'd say print it and hand it out at the table and keep on rolling. I usually just do a black and white doc to save printer ink myself.

nielspeterdejong

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #19 on: November 18, 2022, 04:42:58 PM »
Looks better than my typical player handouts but I pee on it for anime, which I hate. So disregarding my bias which my ethos demands I must state, it'd be a great thing to hand to players at the start of a new campaign. Not much of a guru on the 3e rules, never played pathfinder for example, but if you have playtested it and it works, i'd say print it and hand it out at the table and keep on rolling. I usually just do a black and white doc to save printer ink myself.
To each their own of course, and I appreciate it :) I thought I'd share it here for other 3rd edition and Pathfinder fans, so they can have fun with it as well. So far the feedback from those who played it has been very positive.

nielspeterdejong

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #20 on: November 19, 2022, 11:25:22 AM »
Btw, how popular is Savage Worlds? Do many groups play it? I honestly hadn't heard about it until now.

That's a good question. Relative to DnD? Nothing is popular. Relative to other TTRPG's? Pretty popular from what I can see. It's fully VTT supported, and there has been a massive influx of players converting over from Pathfinder and Palladium Rifts as both of those game systems are licensed and working with Pinnacle to keep their content rolling over seemingly in perpetuity.

Looking at the activity on both their forums and their Discord, Reddit etc. there are tons of people just like you, never heard of it, started playing it, and never went back. I'm one of those people. 40+ years of d20 including writing and development for Paizo and WotC and other third parties, then I played Deadlands back in Explorer Edition (the previous edition to the modern SWADE - Savage Worlds Adventurers Edition - edition) and knew 2-minutes into gameplay that this system could do DnD Fantasy better than DnD and any of its derivatives. I still consider myself a relative newcomer to Savage Worlds. I only wish I got here sooner.

I feel vindicated in that after making those claims the subsequent SWADE edition dropped and then Savage Rifts blew the doors off to show how high this system could scale in regular gameplay. And then when Savage Pathfinder dropped - since all the rules are compatible - it immediately showcased how to run a DnD fantasy game at levels virtually no one plays at except in rarified events. Very very few GM's can or even *want* to maintain a Pathfinder game post 15th lvl. Savage Pathfinder *can* do that level of gameplay without remotely breaking a sweat. And better it can maintain that level of play and *far* beyond that with relative ease.

Savage Worlds being a toolkit put the GM firmly at the wheel for easy rules and mechanics tweaking to fine-tune their game as they see fit. It scales ridiculously easier than d20 does and requires much less effort to run. I'm not saying it's rules-lite. It's low-mid-level crunch once you understand the very basic caveats to its mechanics. But it's far less rigorous than anything d20 and much easier to learn.

Which is exactly what most Pathfinder converts are saying (unsurprisingly) on Reddit and Pinnacle Discord. Frankly none of this surprises me from the Pathfinder crowd. Where I *WAS* shocked was the love Savage Worlds is getting from the Palladium Rifts fandom. Those guys are pretty hardcore, and Savage Rifts has won a lot of them over. So much so going forward all official Palladium products (they have like 8 projects about to be released) will be dual-statted for Savage Worlds.

And in case you don't know - the *reason* I even mention Rifts is because Rifts is *radically* more powerful in context than most things you'd deal with in Pathfinder. The Tarrasque would be a major issue, but would likely be dealt with in relatively short order. It would be one Kaiju+ among **many** other horrible things running around that setting. The chassis upon which Savage Rifts is built can be deconstructed whole or in part to leverage into your high-level Savage Pathfinder games with very little effort. Because the system is designed that way.

So imagine if Pathfinder had rules for 20th-30th level play (and your brain didn't melt from considering those 10-page stat-blocs) but it was actually PLAYABLE not just for kicks and giggles, but for prolonged campaigning. Your characters would START at that power-level and you'd run your campaign normally. Yeah that's how flexible and scalable Savage Worlds is. It's not perfect, but it's damn fine gaming with ridiculous low overhead.

Working with pinacle? What do you mean? I think I'm a bit out of the loop there. Why are so many people abandoning Pathfinder 2E?

Zelen

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #21 on: November 19, 2022, 11:31:15 AM »
Pathfinder 2E is just kind of bland and boring. IMO of course.

nielspeterdejong

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #22 on: November 19, 2022, 11:45:37 AM »
I'm playing it right now myself for the first time. Honestly, some things they did well, like the abilitys core increases at 5th level, where you increase 4 different ability scores by 2, or only by 1 if the score is already 18. However, it doesn't feel like the old school 3rd edition and Pathfinder 1E anymore. It sort of lost it's charm you know?

I mean, it is still fun to play, as I had a fun match with my kitsune yesterday evening where I was able to become a Thaumaturge with foxfire attacks, which you getting 3 actions which you can fill in. But all of that makes it feel more like a board game (and not the roleplaying board game kind of board game) like 4th edition was with its cards.

I'd wish that they'd stuck closer to 3rd edition rules, and simply streamlined those a little better, and added things like Backgrounds from the start, sort of like what Owlgames did with those two pathfinder video games: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous.

Zelen

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #23 on: November 19, 2022, 11:59:16 AM »
IMO Pathfinder 2E is a spiritual successor of DND 4E. Which is really ironic considering the entire reason Pathfinder exists was so some people could avoid DND 4E.

Personally I prefer DND 4E over Pathfinder 2E, but they have their pros and cons.

tenbones

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #24 on: November 19, 2022, 07:35:14 PM »
Working with pinacle? What do you mean? I think I'm a bit out of the loop there. Why are so many people abandoning Pathfinder 2E?

As others have mentioned, PF2e wasn't as popular as they hoped. As to whether or not it has anything to do with their partnership with Pinnacle, is insider baseball I know nothing about. But its very coincidental and convenient while making an awful lot of business sense.

The fact of the matter is that I'm only relaying what those people are saying, and it tracks with my own experience and I used to be a feature writer for Paizo. PF1 like most d20 based games has a solid sweetspot. But it gets progressively more unwieldy beyond that sweetspot, and Savage Worlds can stay in the pocket much longer (in fact I have yet to hit the wall in terms of the upper end) and is much easier to learn. It plays super well on the battlemat, and does equally well without it.

And they're super friendly for user-made content on their SWAG program where you can sell your creations. Although you can't do it for licensed material, you can make it generic with little effort.

nielspeterdejong

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #25 on: November 20, 2022, 01:14:42 PM »
Working with pinacle? What do you mean? I think I'm a bit out of the loop there. Why are so many people abandoning Pathfinder 2E?

As others have mentioned, PF2e wasn't as popular as they hoped. As to whether or not it has anything to do with their partnership with Pinnacle, is insider baseball I know nothing about. But its very coincidental and convenient while making an awful lot of business sense.

The fact of the matter is that I'm only relaying what those people are saying, and it tracks with my own experience and I used to be a feature writer for Paizo. PF1 like most d20 based games has a solid sweetspot. But it gets progressively more unwieldy beyond that sweetspot, and Savage Worlds can stay in the pocket much longer (in fact I have yet to hit the wall in terms of the upper end) and is much easier to learn. It plays super well on the battlemat, and does equally well without it.

And they're super friendly for user-made content on their SWAG program where you can sell your creations. Although you can't do it for licensed material, you can make it generic with little effort.

Hold on, what happened with Pinnacle? Again, I'm a bit out of the loop here, as I honestly have no idea who those are. Could you fill me in real quick?

And the "sweet spot" is actually a pretty good description of how I feel that Pathfinder 1st edition was the better version compared to PF 2, even if it was a tad complicated.

tenbones

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #26 on: November 20, 2022, 10:01:37 PM »
Pinnacle are the publishers of Savage Worlds.

Edit: sorry for the brevity, I don't wanna derail your thread. If you really want to know more about Savage Worlds Pathfinder, and do a side-by-side, go ahead and make a thread and I'll dive right in. I don't want to take the attention away from your creations here. :)

nielspeterdejong

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #27 on: November 21, 2022, 03:41:07 AM »
Pinnacle are the publishers of Savage Worlds.

Edit: sorry for the brevity, I don't wanna derail your thread. If you really want to know more about Savage Worlds Pathfinder, and do a side-by-side, go ahead and make a thread and I'll dive right in. I don't want to take the attention away from your creations here. :)

Hey no worries at all, I honestly appreciate the discussion :) It is nice to have a website where they don't try to shove woke ideology into your face first and foremost, and just see dudes that genuinly enjoy the hobby XD

But are you familiar with 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons then? Funny thing is, the catfolk actually originated from the book Races of the Wild from 2006, but back then they looked more like thundercats as opposed to the furries you see in Pathfinder:



As such I wanted to make a tribute to the OG catfolk, and decided to make my variant here, for those that like to play unique races with animalistic features but without going furry if you will XD Even if that means that basically these catfolk will be more "weebish":



Jokes aside, I quite like them in D&D 3.5 as a unique race. They were still mostly human-ish, and their stats were a fair tradeoff for a +1 LA player race. Here is a link to their old statistics: https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/races/other/catfolk.shtml

I do like how Pathfinder also has strong races like this, but doesn't add the level adjustment and basically lets the DM decide. That does mean that some races are inheritely better than others, but that honestly is fine by me seeing as it makes sense that a centaur is stronger than a human for example. I did add in a optional rule for player races with more than 15 Race Points, which you can find on the second page of my Revised Kitsune Pathfinder race. This way Pathfinder 1st edition players can play as a horse person by giving up three standard feats, to make it a little more fair to the other players. Though in my experience, most players are chill with a stronger race as long as it fits the theme of what they have in mind and they don't go munchkin on everything.

tenbones

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #28 on: November 21, 2022, 10:15:21 AM »
Yes. I'm very familiar with 3e. I've written a couple of 3e books (one with Mike Mearls) and lots of Dragon Magazine articles as a feature writer for Paizo. Done some work for Goodman Games.

I'm also the guy that started the whole the "races as classes" thing for Paizo that started in Dragon for 3e (or so they told me)... starting with, coincidentally Lycanthropes. It's kinda funny because I'd gotten a good dozen emails a year for almost a decade from players/GM's wanting me to do more, or give criticism to their own builds.

Even more coincidental - that article is the one that got me to loathe 3.x/Pathfinder. It encapsulated a *lot* about what was wrong in the perception of how the mechanics work, AND the reality of how they should work for maximum impact. In piecemealing their abilities and narrative assumptions smeared across 20-levels, it showed that the adherence to certain sacred cows within d20 (especially as mutated as they are in 3.x) only hindered actual gameplay in lieu of mechanics *being* the game more than the actual gameplay.

Anyhow - I have no problems with "Cat Folk" or "Bat Folk" or any kind of race someone comes up with... with the caveat that they are deeply contextual to a setting. Otherwise I find any and all races outside of humans being pointless without that context. And in many cases even humans are pointless unless they are properly contextualized.

I want to see cultures, clothing, foods, that support why these races exist. I want customs, histories, unique expressions of the race within their own culture. On their own? They're no different then any mechanical expression that is engaged with in lieu of actual roleplaying. As you do this hobby for a long period of time it has become clear to me that you can do so much more with so much less.

But that's a developmental situation. The OSR is probably only brand of "d20" that I'd have any interest in, but to be honest, I'd rather do my own 10-level version of 2e with deep-beef slaughtering of many of the sacred cows for my own fantasy heartbreaker. Unfortunately its going to remain on the backburner due to many other writing projects I have in the queue.

nielspeterdejong

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Re: My collection of playtested Homebrew for Pathfinder 1st edition
« Reply #29 on: November 21, 2022, 10:31:22 AM »
Yes. I'm very familiar with 3e. I've written a couple of 3e books (one with Mike Mearls) and lots of Dragon Magazine articles as a feature writer for Paizo. Done some work for Goodman Games.

I'm also the guy that started the whole the "races as classes" thing for Paizo that started in Dragon for 3e (or so they told me)... starting with, coincidentally Lycanthropes. It's kinda funny because I'd gotten a good dozen emails a year for almost a decade from players/GM's wanting me to do more, or give criticism to their own builds.

Even more coincidental - that article is the one that got me to loathe 3.x/Pathfinder. It encapsulated a *lot* about what was wrong in the perception of how the mechanics work, AND the reality of how they should work for maximum impact. In piecemealing their abilities and narrative assumptions smeared across 20-levels, it showed that the adherence to certain sacred cows within d20 (especially as mutated as they are in 3.x) only hindered actual gameplay in lieu of mechanics *being* the game more than the actual gameplay.

Anyhow - I have no problems with "Cat Folk" or "Bat Folk" or any kind of race someone comes up with... with the caveat that they are deeply contextual to a setting. Otherwise I find any and all races outside of humans being pointless without that context. And in many cases even humans are pointless unless they are properly contextualized.

I want to see cultures, clothing, foods, that support why these races exist. I want customs, histories, unique expressions of the race within their own culture. On their own? They're no different then any mechanical expression that is engaged with in lieu of actual roleplaying. As you do this hobby for a long period of time it has become clear to me that you can do so much more with so much less.

But that's a developmental situation. The OSR is probably only brand of "d20" that I'd have any interest in, but to be honest, I'd rather do my own 10-level version of 2e with deep-beef slaughtering of many of the sacred cows for my own fantasy heartbreaker. Unfortunately its going to remain on the backburner due to many other writing projects I have in the queue.

Honestly, that's pretty awesome! What I've managed to do at most was create a sequel for "Races of the Dragon" for Dungeons & Dragons 5E, though I spend quite a few years on that. Here is a link to one of the races in case you are interested (the book will have 150 pages and this is a preview, but I'm hoping to start a kickstarter for it next year), which is my half dragon player race. I was never a fan of making the half-dragon a template, so I made it a complete race instead, with the dragon breath recharging on a 6 on a d6 die roll.: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d-XqrHLMfd7MCoNFn7KMK5T5iPPtsIrs/view

Also, the races as classes idea was a pretty good idea, as it gave players some more hit points while still giving them those thematic boons.

But I'm a bit confused what you mean with "that article", as in the one that made you loathe 3x ? Which article are you referring to?

And I've never played 2nd edition to be honest, but I did play Baldur's Gate 2 Shadows of Amn (which was an amazing game by the way!). When compared, what did you feel 3rd edition dit better to 2nd edition, and what did it to worse? I kept hearing how 3rd edition was more "realistic".